Simulation of transport in laminar, tubular reactors and application to ethane pyrolysis

This paper reports on simulation of laminar flow reactors which has been an area of interest for over three decades. Previous workers in this area have employed a wide variety of simplifying assumptions, e.g., irreversible first-order reaction, constant physical properties, and assumed parabolic velocity profile. One motivation for making these simplifying assumption has been to make solution of the governing equation sets tractable. With the advent of more powerful machines and more robust numerical methods, these assumptions are no longer requisite to posing a solvable problem. Rigorous solution of the full set of governing equations will now allow us to accurately simulate (and interpret experiments and scale up) a wider variety of conditions. This is demonstrated through application of the Phoenics simulator to laminar ethane pyrolysis. The ability to predict natural convection in the system with little additional effort is also demonstrated.